lumpen

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

adj. Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified: lumpen intellectuals unable to find work in their fields.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

From German Lumpenproletariat, the lowest section of the proletariat; see lumpenproletariat.

Examples

Our social welfare R50 Billion budget per annum should address the basic needs of people and it should seek to address the problem of poverty, stemming from children, pensioners, people with HIV - AIDS, people with disabilities and the highly unemployable, what we term the lumpen proletariat.

Writing at some length at Labour Home about the complexity of the supposed "swing" to the Tories and the need to do the business for fairness I am a little surprised for this to be described as a lumpen core vote strategy and linked with some worthy Wiseman wishes and thepowerlesslowpaid's slogans by one Stephen Farrington of Cardiff.

Such a lumpen could be the administrator of an establishment where, if the regulations say that a bottle of rum should contain 30 shots -- this is just an example, just to give an example; it is always good to accompany a thought with an example

The causes are something a historian can study and document: the colonial period where long-standing social orders were overturned to serve colonial interests, and not-so-deep-seated animosities between the two main ethnic groups were exacerbated; the hatred of Tutsis that Hutu regimes inculcated even deeper into peasants for years so that most of these poor people at one point actually began to believe Tutsis were devil-like beings with tails and that killing them was their duty; teaming masses of impoverished urban Hutus (of the kind a Marxist would call the lumpen proletariat) murdering their Tutsi neighbors so they would cart off their property and rape their women (just like peasants murdering their neighbor to take his piece of land), and so endlessly on.

Others are the kind of lumpen proletariat that autocracies scoop up in a last-ditch effort to survive: convicted violent criminals, poorly educated young unemployed men, and no small number of sadists, sycophants, and psychopaths.

The chronicle of courageous battles against a vicious state machinery followed by self-sacrifice by thousands of guerrillas, and patient efforts by dedicated cadres to initiate land reforms and social changes in their areas of control, has often been marred by "lumpen" acts like extortions from petty traders and contractors, and ruthless killing of innocent people suspected of being police informers.